Curator Review

Billed as a “modern creativity tool,” Curator is a virtual, iPad-only notebook for organizing websites, images, or text into beautiful, visually rich checkerboards. Up to 25 tiles can be opened full-screen or relocated anywhere on the screen (using just a finger) into a single board. The free app can be used to create up to five such projects, each with a unique name, and move between them with a swipe. Create a sixth board, however, and you’ll be prompted to pony up $6.99 via in-app purchase, which enables you to create an unlimited number of boards.

To place content onto a tile, simply tap and choose an input method: Web search, photos, or text. Images can originate from the built-in camera or an existing photo album, as well as popular social networks and cloud services like Instagram and Dropbox. Another option is Web Images, which turns a search query into an Internet hunt for photos. Search is quite fast, but import was occasionally slow in our testing. We also wound up with a black screen once or twice while importing images from iCloud Photo Sharing.

Once boards are created, a tap in the right corner can be used to enter notes, save to Camera Roll, or share via AirDrop, Mail, Twitter, Facebook, or Flickr; content from individual tiles can also be shared this way. However, the actual boards are somewhat limited in functionality right now – we’d prefer to see additional options for using them in interesting ways outside of Curator.

For now at least, the app is also exclusive to iPad, and locked into portrait mode only. This is one case where actually having an iPhone version (preferably a universal build) would come in handy for capturing inspiration on the go, especially if it involved a sync option so we could continue adding to boards back on the iPad.

The bottom line. Curator is a slick way to organize bits of data for later inspiration, but it’s crying out for an iPhone version and further ways to actually use data stored inside the app.